Mozilla 1.4 Alpha Coming Soon

Monday March 17th, 2003

Asa Dotzler has posted a message about the forthcoming 1.4 Alpha release to netscape.public.mozilla.seamonkey. A number of Mozilla vendors have plans for 1.4 so it is important that both quality and scheduling targets are met in the development cycle. This means that the period between the freeze for 1.4 Alpha and its subsequent release will be days rather than weeks. Right now the freeze is scheduled for midnight on Wednesday 26th March with the release targetted for Friday 28th March.

I can hardly wait for 1.4. I hope it nukes the useless "Don't ask Next Time" option on the profile manager. It'd be nice as a feature; alas, if you check it, start Moz, close Moz, start Netscape, close Netscape, start Moz, it'll load Moz w/ your Netscape profile, which is unacceptable. We NEED to sunder Mozilla profiles from Netscape's soon.

Useless? Don't Think So... I Use Mozilla With My Profile Almost All The Time But Sometimes My Wife Uses It With Her Profile. So I'm Very Glad That I Do Not Need To Choose My Profile Manually All The Time.

Conflict With Another Distribution Is A Different Issue And Doesn't Affect Usefullness Of This Behaviour In Any Way.

Do these other distributions customize their Mozilla releases? RedHat, for example, changes quite a bit more than just packaging (making RPMs). They enable XFT in their build (and soon GTK2, both functionality not offered in the official Mozilla releases). They pack it full of RedHat bookmarks. They support it. For any other Linux distributions that do any work to put Mozilla in the hands of their users, they too should be included in the HOF.

Ok, while http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=179498 greatly helped the situation, I still see massive memory leaks under windows (through 1.3 final; 1.4 hasn't settled down enough yet for me to try, I do watch the checkins daily...)

I do surf using many, many tabs... but after a couple of days, Mozilla's memory usage will have grown to over 100MB. Closing all but the last window and closing all but the last tab will help a little, but not much over all, with memory use still remaining over 100MB.

I've looked around but not found any obvious documentation on how I may help troubleshoot this. The Debug menu item tools don't appear to do much (or I am ignorant in this area at least). Where can I find documentation/debug builds for Windows to help track this down?

Openly speaking, I don't know if it is that important to be able to run an application for several days without leaking memory. IMHO it would be better to decrease the memory consumption while using it just for several hours. On older machines, Mozilla's memory consumption is critical.

>Openly speaking, I don't know if it is that important to be able to run an application for several days without leaking memory.

Ahh... I feel it's very important. Unless you like rebooting.
Quite apart from which we aren't even talking about days here. I could and can run firefox for days without memory leaks _if_ i don't actually use it. Use it to browse the web and all hope is gone. Almost every page visited causes a small memory leak. After not long(minutes to hours) these add up. Since my system has only 128 MB physical ram and the OS takes up 80MB even with paired down processes it isn't long before a reboot is needed. And btw it don't matter if you run it for days or just minutes. A memory leak is just that. It doesn't get recovered when the app closes. Its gone forever until reboot. Sigh. Sadly its worse than M$ office. I can run 20 windows of IE w/o memory leaks. Firefox should be better than IE and in most respects it is, just not for memory leaks. Respectfully.

I don't think the guy was looking for an endless list of bugs that saw active development the past few days but rather a short list of the more important things that have landed. I realize the mozilla developers probably have better things to do then to maintain such lists (would be nice to have some automated summary though). So I expect the alpha will come with some release notes just as usual.

It does not work anymore with Hotmail, Yahoo, Operamail, and other university email sites. It does not promt to save the password and user name anymore. I do not think that this is a regression bug; it is probably related to some other factor since this failure started when the webmail sites changed their services. I would like to mention that Opera handles more than 90% of these sites successfully (by the password manager in version 7). I hope that hey plan to improve and fix the password manager in Mozilla. This is the main reason I switched to Opera...

I think this is done on purpose by the web site writers. Yahoo does this too. If the web site doesn't want us to save passwords (ie: for security reasons), should we break protocol in order to save them?

Not that it's the right thing to do, but how does IE handle these sites?

"I think this is done on purpose by the web site writers. Yahoo does this too. If the web site doesn't want us to save passwords (ie: for security reasons), should we break protocol in order to save them?"

There is no protocol. IE introduced an autocomplete="off" attribute that sites could use to disable the saving of passwords and form data. Mozilla originally didn't support this but several online banks threatened to block Mozilla unless it was implemented, so support was added.

Top 10 reasons to got to 2.0
<ul>
<li>10. The team will be going to the 2.0 designation when Mozilla switches from Gecko to KHTML
<li>9. The team will be going to the 2.0 designation after the next update of ISO 8879 (ISO 8879:20xx)
<li>8. The team will be going to the 2.0 designation when they run out of numbers to put after 1.
<li>7. The team will be going to the 2.0 designation when Jamie Zawinski comes back to work for AOL
<li>6. The team will be going to the 2.0 designation when all the Mozilla bugs in Bugzilla are fixed
</ul>

If making the pref visible is also not permitted by banks (how do Opera get around this?) then how about a simple xpinstall that turns off this 'feature'? (I presume it's easy to do as it only has to set a pref...)

Could be hosted at mozdev or whatever, not part of the browser. Better than a bookmarklet since it would work 'for good'...

(I am NOT volunteering to do this as (a) I don't particularly care about it and (b) I have no idea how to do mozilla development - but for those people who *do* care about it, surely one of them would be able to develop it...)

[plug alert] If you don't fancy digging into prefs.js, try my Mozilla extension Preferential (http://preferential.mozdev.org). It provides a tree-based structure where you can look at and modify any Mozilla extension without ever leaving the GUI.

[plug alert] If you don't fancy digging into prefs.js, try my Mozilla extension Preferential (http://preferential.mozdev.org). It provides a tree-based structure where you can look at and modify any Mozilla preference without ever leaving the GUI.

If I were you, I'll write a letter to bank with nearly such content (sorry for bad english):

"Dr. Sir or Madam!

According to your request we have introduced support of autocomplete="off" in our browser. But in users' opinion this feature seems to be doubtful.

The main argument which is expressed repeatedly is that there are many password managers for Internet Explorer. These utilities remember password irrespective of autocomplete parameter in form field. You can't detect this software on server side, thus the pointing of autocomplete="off" loses any sense.

If you concern that an undesirable person will launch Mozilla on the same computer and log on to your site using saved password, we would inform you that our Personal Security Manager denies using autocomplete until user enters Master Password. When user is prompted to enter Master Password for the first time, Password Quality Meter suggests him to choose long and complicated password. Moreover, our browser enables the user to log off from Personal Security Manager temporary if he/she wants to go away from workplace for a while.

There is no way to read saved form data without entering a Master Password. Autocomplete data are strongly encrypted. If user has forgotten a Master Password, he/she should use Reset Master Password feature which automatically clears all saved passwords.

We consider that using our reliable and open-source Password Manager is much better that using shady programs such as Gator for remembering passwords. If you still have reasons to keep support of autocomplete="off" in Mozilla, we would be pleased to hear it.